Wednesday, 30 April 2008

HOUSTON: The worldwide offshore contracted rig count grew by two this week, while the total available offshore rig fleet size is unchanged, according to ODS-Petrodata's weekly mobile offshore rig count.

In the Asia/Australia region, the number of rigs under contract rose by one this week, thanks to a new jackup contract. With 100 out of 103 available offshore rigs under contract, fleet utilization stands at 97.1 percent.

All 99 mobile offshore drilling units in the European/Mediterranean region are under contract; European offshore rig fleet utilization is 100.0 percent.

The U.S. Gulf of Mexico contracted and total offshore rig counts are unchanged this week. With 100 rigs out of 125 available under contract, fleet utilization remains at an even 80.0 percent.

The South American offshore drilling fleet size and number of rigs under contract are unchanged this week. With 68 rigs out of 92 available under contract, fleet utilization is 73.9 percent.

In West Africa, the offshore rig fleet size and the number of contracted rigs are unchanged. With 57 rigs out of 58 available under contract, utilization remains at 98.3 percent.

Sunday, 9 March 2008

George Soros said that what we are seeing is not just another recession but the unwinding of the huge credit bubble that began after WW2. Fund manager Jim Rogers said we are going to see something much worse than a normal recession, and that the severity of the onset is surprising him.

Well, surprises to the downside appear to be the norm these days. I think the Central banks, the Fed and ECB, are nothing less than horrified, a bit panicked, and realize their normal major weapons to combat this Depression 2.0 are not working much at all. If this is a credit crisis, offering more credit does not work, people cannot pay what they already have borrowed. We already are seeing cases where banks are freezing their balance sheets (not lending new loans) to try and stem the bleeding. I saw one commentator (Mike Shedlock) say the US banks have lost their entire net capital so far! Financial institutions are literally shell shocked at how fast this happened. (Witness financial mass destruction ala W. Buffett thanks to derivatives.)

In fact, I am seeing comments from financial media that big investors are beginning to realize just what I said above, that the Central Banks have lost control of the situation.

Gold is rallying in this whole mess. In fact, if you look at gold's big rises in the last year, it correlates well with the onset of the credit crisis after Aug, September.

Gold seems to think we are in stagflation. Gold rose dramatically in the stagflation of the 1970s. We see many of the same trends today. The credit bust has caused central banks to flood out money, and growth is stalling. Inflation remains a problem, tying central bank's hands, and since we are in negative real rates (inflation is higher than US interest rates, hence negative) gold reacts by rising dramatically. Gold rises big in negative inflation environments.

As central banks combat Depression 2.0 and try to stave of deflation which wants to emerge, and markets contract and spending contracts, gold will rise during the stagflationary stage, which we are in now.

At some point, deflation might actually come into the picture, and gold steady if the US and ECB don't panic and just flood out $trillions and trillions to try and stop the deflation from emerging.

But, in any case, unless things change the direction they are going, and if the credit bubbles continue to be paralyzed and deleveraging, and central banks keep flooding out money and lowering interest rates, gold will rise well over $1000 in 08 and stay there.

“Market conditions are the worst anyone in this industry can ever remember. I don't think anyone has a recollection of a total disappearance in liquidity...There are billion of dollars worth of assets out there for which there is just no market.” Alain Grisay, chief executive officer of London-based F&C Asset Management Plc; Bloomberg News

The hurricane that began with subprime mortgages, has swept through the credit markets wreaking havoc on municipal bonds, hedge funds, complex structured investments, and agency debt (Fannie Mae). Now the first gusts from the Force-5 gale are touching down in the real economy where the damage is expected to be widespread.

The Labor Department reported on Friday that US employers cut 63,000 jobs in February, the biggest monthly decline in five years. The cut in payrolls added to the 22,000 jobs that were lost in January. 52,000 jobs were cut in manufacturing, while 331,000 have been lost in construction since September 2006. The Labor Department also reported on Wednesday that worker productivity slowed significantly in the last quarter of 2007. When productivity is off; labor costs go up which adds to inflationary pressures. That makes it harder for the Fed to lower rates to stimulate the economy without inviting the dreaded “stagflation”---slow growth and rising prices.

Webster's defines complacency as “1.satisfaction or contentment 2. smug self-satisfaction” There is probably not a better word to describe the current state of perception with regard to economic and financial malady. I had an interesting conversation the other night about exactly this topic and the individual I was speaking with had an overriding belief that we cannot suffer economically simply because the current generation is not prepared to deal with it. While I certainly agree with the latter assertion, the former continues to baffle me. I am certainly not prepared to deal with a lengthy hospital stay as the result of a horrific car crash, but that alone doesn't cloak me in immunity from having an accident. The reasoning is so broken and flawed, yet it is often all we get in terms of a perception of what is going on.

This disconnect begets a discussion of why exactly it is that society has chosen to believe itself to be immune from bad things. It is odd in itself that when you talk to individuals, they seem to be acutely aware of many of the challenges facing us, but when you put all the individuals together and create a society, we act as though the party will indeed last forever. We are certainly dealing with a situation in which the intelligence of the whole is by far less than the sum of all its parts. Here's a little bit of déjà vu for you, compliments of Wikipedia:

“ In the 1920s, Americans consumers and businesses relied on cheap credit, the former to purchase consumer goods such as automobiles and furniture and the later for capital investment to increase production. This fueled strong short-term growth but created consumer and commercial debt. People and businesses who were deeply in debt when price deflation occurred or demand for their product decreased often risked default. Many drastically cut current spending to keep up time payments, thus lowering demand for new products. Businesses began to fail as construction work and factory orders plunged.”

Sound familiar anyone? See any price deflation going on? The Wilshire 5000 has only lost about 2.5 TRILLION dollars in value in the last two months or so. What about the loss in home equity? Another trillion or two? Who knows, but I think you get the point. We are seeing almost to the final utterance the same play we saw unfold in 1929. Were those folks any more prepared for the Great Depression than we are today? I'd argue that while they were perhaps a bit better equipped to provide for their own sustenance that American society in the 1920's was as complacent as we are today. When the realization of history's coup de grace hits, we will be caught as unaware as our ancestors were back in 1929.

Here are some other examples of what Alan Greenspan likes to call ‘irrational exuberance' in the 1920's:

"We will not have any more crashes in our time."

John Maynard Keynes in 1927 (The authenticity of this one is a little suspect) DOW ~ 175

"There may be a recession in stock prices, but not anything in the nature of a crash." - Irving Fisher, leading U.S. economist, New York Times, Sept. 5, 1929 – DOW ~ 375

"All safe deposit boxes in banks or financial institutions have been sealed... and may only be opened in the presence of an agent of the I.R.S." - President F.D. Roosevelt, 1933 – DOW ~ 65

Tuesday morning we received news that according to the Institute of Supply Management, the service portion of our economy underwent a significant contraction during the month of December. This is alarming given the fact that December is normally one of the busiest times of the year. Even still, a trip past the local mall provides a busy scene. People are streaming in and out, carrying boxes and bags of imported trinkets to their imported cars. They will then use imported gasoline to drive to their home, the mortgage of which is likely to be owned by a foreign investor. Yet the average American citizen sees nothing wrong with this picture. Or could it be that they don't even see the picture at all? The media has certainly been playing the role of absentee informant in recent years, choosing to focus on such insipid topics as Britney Spears' latest rehab stint rather than the important business at hand.

Here now, are some quotes from this generation's 1929..in 2007 and 2008:

"As I think you know, I believe very strongly that a strong dollar is in our nation's interest, and I'm a big believer in currencies being set in a competitive, open marketplace," - Henry Paulson – Secretary of the Treasury – USDX ~ 81.50

““We are making history. What has passed the Congress in record time is a gift to the middle class and those who aspire to it in our country.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on the $168 Billion tax ‘rebate' while the middle class is spending their Wal-Mart Christmas gift cards on food and other necessities.

They're making history all right. Too bad it will end up being the WRONG kind. How can we ever hope to focus the population on the urgency of our current predicament when our leaders are willing to make it worse by handing our freebies, bailing out those who willingly make poor investment choices and telling us everything can be ‘free' if we'll only pull their lever on election day?

Or am I putting the cart in front of the horse? Perhaps a contrarian opinion might be that our leaders are giving the public exactly what it wants. In either case, I am quite certain that our state of unpreparedness will not constitute a free pass from the negative effects of a recession or a retraction of any of the financial excesses we've enjoyed over the past few decades.

By Andy Sutton

Andy Sutton holds a MBA with Honors in Economics from Moravian College and is a member of Omicron Delta Epsilon International Honor Society in Economics.

Saturday, 26 January 2008

In the world of competitive finance, there's never a bad time to make money. Sure the subprime market has many feeling the pinch, but the real opportunists find ways to profit in any circumstance. For example, one strategy is short selling or in other words, betting on a loss. In a must read NYTimes article, Ben Stein examines Goldman Sach's practices of knowingly creating and selling flawed financial investments while covering themselves in the process.

But it's not just the Big Guys who are getting all the breaks. In my favorite story of the subprime fiasco, some people are fighting foreclosures with impressive Talmudic reasoning:

A Federal Court Judge rejected 14 foreclosure claims by Deutsche Bank, which was trying to collect on securitized sub-prime mortgage loans it acquired. The judge stated that the Bank did not really own the “bad loans” because it acquired them after defaults had already occurred. He asked the bank to prove it held the mortgage at the time of the foreclosure notices or said he will dismiss its claims.The snowballing effect of subprime defaults is the result of repackaging, revaluing, and reselling various debts to various investors. However, once the debt is securitized and resold it can be difficult to track down who owned what and when. As a result Deutsche Bank not only loses on the initial investment, but cannot even recoup the losses through the typical hedge of property foreclosure.

Click on the Radio icon TNG and hear a discussion for California Investors with debate about real estate opportunities in the current crises in USA

Wednesday, 23 January 2008

First sovereign wealth fund set up in 1956 for the Gilbert Islands now called kiribati. By 2005 the fund now known as the Kiribati Revenue Equalisation Reserve Fund , had grown in value to more than $636m

Norway is currently the most transparent Sovereign Fund in the world. For further details on Sovereign Wealth Funds see Nordic Partnership report for potential for new sovereign wealth funds 2008.

The sovereign wealth funds are estimated to control more than $2 trillion in assets, more than hedge funds. And a lot of is coming out of jurisdictions that are raking in money from rising oil prices.

The problem is that this puts an enormous amount of power into the hands of a small number of people. And governments are not the same as shareholders, they have different agendas. Particularly if they represent autocratic regimes.

On the other hand, these sorts of investments help to stabilize markets. The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority's move on Citigroup is a case in point.

What's needed is more transparency. Getting the funds to release reports detailing their strategies and holdings would be a good start. But how that's worked out remains to be seen. Still, an answer is needed because this problem will not go away.

Kuwaiti fund eyes US subprime bargains

By Henny Sender in New York

Published: January 1 2008 22:03 | Last updated: January 1 2008 22:03

The Kuwait Investment Authority is following its peers in the Middle East in the hope of finding bargain investments in the US in the wake of the subprime mortgage crisis.

The $213bn sovereign wealth fund, unique in the Middle East because its inflows are governed by law and subject to parliamentary oversight, rather than the wishes of the ruling family, is particularly interested in opportunities in financial services.

“Perhaps we are at the eye of the storm now and are close to the peak of the problem,” Bader Al-Sa’ad, head of the KIA, told the Financial Times. “We don’t see prices dropping much more.”

Mr Al-Sa’ad said he intended to speed up decision-making at the KIA to take advantage of the opportunities thrown up by the crisis. “With Citi, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority had good timing,” he said, noting that it took ADIA less than three weeks to seal its late November deal to invest $7.5bn in convertible securities in Citigroup. “I believe we need to move faster in some of our response time.”

In recent months, the KIA has been scouring Asia for investments, especially in banks, to capitalise on torrid economic growth in the region. The KIA has already made huge profits on its $700m stake in Industrial and Commercial Bank of China. But Asian banks are also expensive, trading in many cases at up to six times book value. By contrast, banks in Europe and the US, which have been hard-hit by the turmoil in the mortgage market, are trading at about book value, he said.

Like executives at other sovereign wealth funds, Mr Al-Sa’ad expressed dismay that off-balance sheet issues could surface in the US so soon after the shock of Enron’s implosion, following that company’s massive use of off-balance sheet vehicles to disguise the extent of its debts.

Mr Al-Sa’ad said sovereign wealth funds were long-term investors and far more stable than hedge funds because they do not use a lot of leverage. He took care to highlight the differences among sovereign wealth funds, noting that while some are increasingly competing with private equity firms, others, such as the KIA, seek to partner with them.

Japan to create £25bn sovereign fund to invest in markets hit by sub-prime

The Times reports that, “Japan is in advanced discussions to create its first sovereign wealth fund in a move aimed at mobilising one of the world’s biggest pools of foreign exchange reserves. The plans, described to The Times by the Minister for Financial Services and Administrative Reform, would give Japan membership of what is fast becoming a formidably powerful club of investors.”

Libya’s sovereign fund shuns US investments

Published: 03 February 2008 11:23

The head of Libya's National Oil Company has said that the country's $100bn sovereign wealth fund would avoid buying assets in the US because of the increasingly negative attitude towards investment by sovereign funds.

The circular Solar Islands with a diameter of 5 kilometers and an height of 20 meters consists of a torus, which is the steam storage, carrying the termosolar panels placed on a membrane.

What will the world be like in the New Energy Age?

The post-Hydrocarbon Fuel Age will be unrecognizable to people alive today. Central station power plants belching smoke and harmful gases will be a thing of the past: there will be no power grid. The grid will gradually wither and die during the transition to distributed New Energy devices, which could be as rapid and dramatic as the transition to the personal computer/Internet era that began in the mid-1970s. Pollution caused by hydrocarbon-fuel combustion will be a thing of the past. In a world of effectively free energy (no significant recurring costs for the energy), all the world’s populations will become richer. People will be able to be much more self-reliant, unchained from central controlling authorities that today rule energy use. (Governments will continue to try to tax and control the use of energy, but they will fail—as they have failed so far in trying to tax the Internet.) It will be possible to build self-contained dwellings and communities anywhere that construction materials can be brought in—in forests, atop mountains, on remote islands, on the surface of bodies of water, and even on ocean or lake floors! There will be no geographic localization of fuel resources (such as in the Middle East today), so the fight over oil will disappear as one underlying cause of conflict and war. Cheap desalination and water pumping will make deserts bloom. It will be extremely cheap to produce clean, potable water anywhere. Agriculture will profoundly change, as New Energy makes available anywhere: fertilizer, light, heat, cooling, and shelter from insect pests. Transportation disasters in which people are burned alive by hydrocarbon fuels will be an unimaginable nightmare of the past; no one will think of carrying such explosive substances on fast-moving vehicles! Through discoveries already made in the LENR field, it will be possible to remediate existing nuclear waste— reduce it to non-radioactive forms. And, shocking but almost certain to happen, it will be possible to produce rare elements cheaply through LENR reactions— yes, an age of “modern alchemy” will emerge.

Morgan Stanley Closes $200 Million Solar Fund with Recurrent Energy

January 21, 2008

Source: Clean Edge News

Recurrent Energy, a solar services company, recently announced the close of a $200 million staged solar project fund with Morgan Stanley. The fund represents a commitment by Morgan Stanley to provide financing for $100mm of Recurrent Energy's solar electric power projects in 2008 and an additional $100mm in 2009.

"Morgan Stanley is a leader in the industry and their commitment to financing renewable energy has been clear from the start," said Arno Harris, chief executive officer of Recurrent Energy. "We look forward to putting this new fund to work quickly to help our clients transform empty rooftops into value-generating, sustainable assets."

Recurrent Energy sells solar electricity from its projects to institutional property owners (REITs and pension funds) and their tenants via a power purchase agreement at grid-competitive rates. Called Solar as a ServiceSM, Recurrent Energy's offering enables its customers to cost-effectively reduce their use of fossil-generated electricity across large property portfolios.

"Morgan Stanley is excited to work with Recurrent Energy to finance its solar power solution for institutional property owners. Recurrent Energy's unique approach to the rooftop solar market, in conjunction with the federal and state incentives, creates an innovative and economic solar solution for the marketplace," said Edward Levin, a Vice President of Morgan Stanley.

NANO TECHNOLOGY WILL CHANGE THE WAY WE THINK ABOUT MATERIALS AND CHANGE LIFE AS WE KNOW IT FOREVER. NANO TECHNOLOGY WILL ALSO MERGE INTO THE LIVING WORLD WHERE CURRENTLY BIO NANO MACHINES ALREADY GO ABOUT THEIR DAILY BUSINESS IN SIDE US ALL.....

In 1962, Thomas Kuhn wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolution, and fathered, defined and popularized the concept of "paradigm shift" (p.10). Kuhn argues that scientific advancement is not evolutionary, but rather is a "series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually violent revolutions", and in those revolutions "one conceptual world view is replaced by another".

Think of a Paradigm Shift as a change from one way of thinking to another. It's a revolution, a transformation, a sort of metamorphosis. It just does not happen, but rather it is driven by agents of change.

For example, agriculture changed early primitive society. The primitive Indians existed for centuries roaming the earth constantly hunting and gathering for seasonal foods and water. However, by 2000 B.C., Middle America was a landscape of very small villages, each surrounded by patchy fields of corn and other vegetables.

Agents of change helped create a paradigm-shift moving scientific theory from the Plolemaic system (the earth at the center of the universe) to the Copernican system (the sun at the center of the universe), and moving from Newtonian physics to Relativity and Quantum Physics. Both movements eventually changed the world view. These transformations were gradual as old beliefs were replaced by the new paradigms creating "a new gestalt" (p. 112).

Likewise, the printing press , the making of books and the use of vernacular language inevitable changed the culture of a people and had a direct affect on the scientific revolution. Johann Gutenberg's invention in the 1440's of movable type was an agent of change. Books became readily available, smaller and easier to handle and cheap to purchase. Masses of people acquired direct access to the scriputures. Attitudes began to change as people were relieved from church domination.

Similarly, agents of change are driving a new paradigm shift today. The signs are all around us. For example, the introduction of the personal computer and the internet have impacted both personal and business environments, and is a catalyst for a Paradigm Shift. We are shifting from a mechanistic, manufacturing, industrial society to an organic, service based, information centered society, and increases in technology will continue to impact globally. Change is inevitable. It's the only true constant.

In conclusion, for millions of years we have been evolving and will continue to do so. Change is difficult. Human Beings resist change ; however, the process has been set in motion long ago and we will continue to co-create our own experience. Kuhn states that "awareness is prerequisite to all acceptable changes of theory" (p. 67). It all begins in the mind of the person. What we perceive, whether normal or metanormal, conscious or unconscious, are subject to the limitations and distortions produced by our inherited and socially conditional nature. However, we are not restricted by this for we can change. We are moving at an accelerated rate of speed and our state of consciousness transforming and transcending. Many are awakening as our conscious awareness expands.

Reference: Kuhn, Thomas, S., "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", Second Edition, Enlarged, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1970(1962)

WE ARE NOT HUMAN BEINGSHAVING A SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCEWE ARE SPIRITUAL BEINGSHAVING A HUMAN EXPERIENCE

Nordic Partnership - Saving costs

Nordic has been using skype since 2003 when it was first released and has persuaded many clients to use skype saving clients millions of USD in communication costs.

Minimum contract value per instruction $25,000.00

Quotations given on request for funds raised < $2.5 million

5% charged on funds raised > $2.5 million

Project teams

Minimum size of a team two persons, people work best in pairs so typical size of teams would be 2,4,6,8,10 and so on.

Typical team 4 persons (2011 pricing)

1 team leader

1 lawyer

1 accountant

1 relevant expert for project

____________________

£625.00 cost per 4 man team unit of time (15 mins)

Fees

No upfront fees need to be paid however all fees need to be agreed to prior to any work being undertaken. The Project Owner "Client" will need to deposit funds into their own client account to cover the agreed liability to be deposited with Berg Legal who will open a client account ( subject to normal compliance) in the name of the client.

Berg Legal can then give an undertaking based on the funds they hold to make payment with the clients agreement against pre agreed work in advance of the work being carried out.

Communications

Get Skype and call us for free from any where in the world, all clients and consultants are encourage to use skype in order to keep communication costs down.

Projects

Please send no more than a one page summary of your project with your funding requirements to nordicpartnership@gmail.com

Consultants

Best of breed consultants, specialists with specific country experience wanted to join small project teams for :-

1. Feasibility & Risk analyses

2. Strategic Funding solutions

3. Procurement studies new v used

4. Building executive and management teams short term and long term

Please send your CV to nordicpartnership@gmail.com and project experience and country experience with detail of the last project you worked on.

Projects Nordic Partnership have worked on and has access to skilled project management teams with project experience.